DEATHTRAP DUEL

In the final four months of the Game Design bachelor degree at Full Sail University, students are tasked to make a game. In a team of six, I helped create Deathtrap Duel.

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Deathtrap Duel was an idea that I originally pitched and was chosen by our team as the game that we were going to create. The goal since the beginning was to make a tower defense game that didn't feel quite like a standard one. We wanted the player's goal to be to eliminate the enemies in a creative way, rather than simply to just eliminate them. The player must utilize various traps that can be built on different surfaces to create a combo and get ahead of the opponent. Performing combos grants the player mana, which they can use to channel spells. Spells can either help the player using them or hinder their opponent. Whichever player loses all of their treasure first loses!

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My first task at the beginning of development was to create the building system. We needed to show a build to our teacher at the end of each week, so I knew that this system would be the most important task. The system uses a raycast from either the mouse position on screen or the center of the screen (depending on if the player is using mouse and keyboard or controller) to a point in the world, and rounds its x, y, and z points to the nearest integer. This makes the trap "snappy" and move in a grid-like fashion. This was very important for us so that trap placement was simpler and was easier to build the environment for.

This system was my main task for the entire project. It underwent many changes and improvements over the duration of development. In the beginning, a green box displayed where the trap would be placed. Later on, I improved it so that it would show the actual trap. I added rotation to the building and improved wall traps so that they would always snap in the direction facing away from the wall. Eventually, the traps changed colors depending on if the placement was valid or not, and a message would appear when the player couldn't place the trap. 

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I also went on to design the mana system. One of my teammates had created an initial way to cast spells early on, so I used some of his code in the new system that I was designing. He also created our combo system, so I needed to work with him to combine the two systems. As players generated combos, they received mana accordingly. We worked together to ensure that the amount of mana that was being rewarded felt adequate and fair. I streamlined the way that we created and deployed spells so that if another teammate wanted to prototype a new spell or have me create one, it would be very easy to do so.

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In our final month, we worked with students from the Game Art program. I acted as the middleman between our four artists and my team. I explained to the artists the vision that our team had and I worked with them to ensure that their work fit what we needed. When I wasn't working on the building system or mana system, I was helping wherever I could. I mostly worked with our UI designer and helped keep our game loop functioning smoothly. I had a good understanding of each system that ran our game.

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I am very proud of both my team's efforts and my effort throughout this development process. Although we didn't have artists for very long, I think we made good progress with them. This was our first time working on a team this large, making a game of this scale, and working with a team of artists. We showcased this game at Full Sail's Final Project Showcase that was open to the public. I am very happy to have this work in my portfolio and I believe this is a very good starting point in my career.